Louis Zimman
Biographic Data
| ID | 168218 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Louis Zimman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Louis |
| FAMILY NAME | Zimman |
| SIGNATURE | ZIMMAN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3961-1357 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 182 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Transphobic legislation and the linguist: The case of Florida’s Subsection 3
This paper joins critical sociolinguistic approaches to the law by examining legislation limiting trans-affirming language use, especially in schools, with a focus on Florida Statute §1000.071. Subsection (3) of this law prohibits most transgender teachers from sharing their pronouns with students. The analysis begins by extracting the linguistic claims made in legal defense of §1000.071: 1) that it is “false” to refer to a trans woman as she or …
That 3-word-ultimatum: The relationship escalator and normative romance in metalinguistic commentary about I love you
I love you is among the most meaningful utterances in English speakers' organization of intimacy, yet remains understudied by scholars of language. This article investigates metapragmatic discourse about the first exchange of I love you between romantic partners using data from the social media platform Reddit. The discourse reveals a normative model in which I love you functions not only as an expression of emotion but a speech act that is ideol…
Current norms and best practices for collecting and representing sex/gender in linguistics: Towards ethical and inclusive methodologies
Amid changing ideas about sex and gender, there is a growing need to reexamine norms around their operationalization and theorization. This talk presents results from a survey exploring linguists’ practices for collecting information about research participants’ sex/gender. Based on 157 complete responses to date, we explore the popularity of different methods for gathering information about sex/gender and the methodological and theoretical impli…
Cultivating trans linguistics: Creativity and contestation
This special issue on trans linguistics forefronts both resistance and creativity in responding to transphobia and other interlocking power dynamics that trans people must navigate. These practices exist in the context of growing hostilities, violence and repression of gender non-normative practices on a global scale. The articles highlight the unique configurations of communication born out of trans experiences, illustrating how their study can …
Trans language activism and intersectional coalitions
Roundtable: Affordances, Diversity, and Inclusion on Dating Apps - A Dialogue between Sociologists and Media Studies Researchers about ‘Hinge
This roundtable paper is part of the project ‘Digitized Love and Intimacy on Hinge.’ It aims to investigate how digital dating apps reconfigure cultural attitudes to love and intimacy and, conversely, how said attitudes influence digital dating practices. The conversation is informed by (n)ethnographic usage of the app. As algorithms and affordances of dating applications can implicitly or explicitly privilege certain groups of users and exclude …
Transformative spiritualities: For the pilgrimage of justice and peace
The Churches of the World Council of Churches have been on a "Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace"- together with people of goodwill—since they met for their assembly in Busan in 2013. Building peace with justice has been at the heart of the ecumenical movement since its beginnings. It reflects the call of the churches in a wounded world caused by systemic injustice - racism, sexism, xenophobia, economic exploitation, and violence among humans and ag…
Beyond binary gender: Creaky voice, gender, and the variationist enterprise
This paper promotes a sophisticated treatment of gender in variationism through a large-scale quantitative analysis of creak, a nonmodal voice quality stereotypically associated with women in US English. An analysis of our gender-diverse corpus, including cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, finds that gender does not predict variation; all gender groups produce high rates of creak. However, gender does interact with style: all spea…
Beyond the cis gays’ cis gaze
Trans and other nonnormatively gendered subjectivities served a foundational role in queer linguistics, but it is only recently that a wave of trans researchers have begun to carve out distinctively trans approaches to the study of language. This commentary explores the question of why this shift has taken so long and how certain disciplinary norms have made linguistics a less-than-attractive home for trans scholars, namely an apoliticised ideolo…
Sociophonetics
Sociophonetics is an analytic approach that overlaps with, but is also distinct from, related areas of study such as quantitative and variationist sociolinguistics. The distinctive characteristics of sociophonetics include the use of continuous (rather than categorical) variables, an interest in perception as well as production, and the implementation of a range of methods for data collection in both field settings and laboratories. Increasingly,…
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, is among the oldest and most fundamental tools of modern linguistic description and analysis. Established by the International Phonetic Association in the late nineteenth century, the IPA serves as a universal, standardized system for representing human speech, regardless of the language(s) of the speaker or the transcriber. The IPA has a number of useful qualities, the most important of which are (i) …
How we got here: Short-scale change in identity labels for trans, cis, and non-binary people in the 2000s
Though understudied in research on language variation and change, the lexicon is a crucial domain for sociopolitical transformations of language. This paper presents a corpus-based sociolinguistic analysis of changes in terms for transgender, cisgender, and non-binary individuals in four online communities on the social media blogging site, LiveJournal.com – one for trans women, one for trans men, one for non-binary people, and another for transg…
Trans self-identification and the language of neoliberal selfhood: Agency, power, and the limits of monologic discourse
Sociocultural linguists share with transgender communities a strong interest in the power of individuals to assert agency over linguistic patterns. For trans people, a key principle of activism isgender self-determination, which treats each individual as the ultimate authority on their own gender identity. This article explores some of the ways gender self-determination and self-identification surface in transgender people's linguistic practices.…
Transgender voices: Insights on identity, embodiment, and the gender of the voice
The voice is a highly salient cue in the perception of gender and an important analytic factor in both phonetic and sociophonetic analysis. Although we have a wealth of knowledge about the social construction of gender through language, gender differences in the voice are frequently treated as natural, direct products of sex differentiation. This article focuses on three major areas of insight from studies of transgender people's voices that buil…
Transgender language reform
Transgender people's recent increase in visibility in the contemporary United States has presented new linguistic challenges. This article investigates those challenges and presents strategies developed by trans speakers and promoted by trans activists concerned with language reform. The first of these is the selection of gendered lexical items, including both gender identity terms (woman, man, etc.) and more implicitly gendered words (e.g. beaut…
Variability in /s/ among transgender speakers: Evidence for a socially grounded account of gender and sibilants
Sibilant consonants are well-established as resources for the negotiation of gender and sexuality, but the origin of these links is less clearly agreed upon. Some researchers have pointed to sex differentiation in the vocal anatomy as a potential cause for gender differences in /s/, though a review of the literature indicates that learned articulatory patterns play a critical role. This article focuses on the spectral qualities of /s/ among 15 En…
Gender as stylistic bricolage: Transmasculine voices and the relationship between fundamental frequency and /s
Despite the importance of gender differences in the voice, sociolinguists have not paid sufficient attention to the sociolinguistic processes through which phonetic resources are mobilized in the construction of a gendered voice. This article argues that gender differences in the voice-including those influenced by physiology-are best understood as elements of sociolinguistic style rather than static properties. With a focus on transgender speake…
Boycunts and Bonus Holes: Trans Men's Bodies, Neoliberalism, and the Sexual Productivity of Genitals
Recent theorizations of trans embodiment have brought attention to the ways neoliberalism limits the productivity of nonnormatively gendered bodies. This article deals with the discursive framing of embodiment and sexual desirability among trans men and other transmasculine persons negotiating Internet-mediated homoerotic spaces. Micro-level analysis of discourse structure and macro-level analysis of socio-political context together show how tran…
Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech: The perceived sexuality of transgender men
Sociophonetic inquiry into sexuality and the voice has often focused on the perception of men’s sexuality on the basis of disembodied voices. However, inconsistencies across these studies limit our ability to unite their findings into a cohesive model of gay-sounding speech. This paper focuses on variability among gay-sounding speakers by analyzing the voices of female-to-male transgender individuals, or trans men. Trans men who make use of testo…
The other kind of coming out’
This article demonstrates the importance of considering transgender speakers apart from gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, even where there is significant overlap in the linguistic practices of these groups. Through an analysis of transgender coming out narratives, it is shown that previous accounts of this genre, which have focused on gays and lesbians, do not extend to the entire LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community. Coming out …
Speaking out: The female voice in public contexts. Edited by Judith Baxter. Basingstoke, England and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
The other kind of coming out’
This article demonstrates the importance of considering transgender speakers apart from gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, even where there is significant overlap in the linguistic practices of these groups. Through an analysis of transgender coming out narratives, it is shown that previous accounts of this genre, which have focused on gays and lesbians, do not extend to the entire LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community. Coming out …
Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech: The perceived sexuality of transgender men
Sociophonetic inquiry into sexuality and the voice has often focused on the perception of men’s sexuality on the basis of disembodied voices. However, inconsistencies across these studies limit our ability to unite their findings into a cohesive model of gay-sounding speech. This paper focuses on variability among gay-sounding speakers by analyzing the voices of female-to-male transgender individuals, or trans men. Trans men who make use of testo…
Gender as stylistic bricolage: Transmasculine voices and the relationship between fundamental frequency and /s
Despite the importance of gender differences in the voice, sociolinguists have not paid sufficient attention to the sociolinguistic processes through which phonetic resources are mobilized in the construction of a gendered voice. This article argues that gender differences in the voice-including those influenced by physiology-are best understood as elements of sociolinguistic style rather than static properties. With a focus on transgender speake…
Boycunts and Bonus Holes: Trans Men's Bodies, Neoliberalism, and the Sexual Productivity of Genitals
Recent theorizations of trans embodiment have brought attention to the ways neoliberalism limits the productivity of nonnormatively gendered bodies. This article deals with the discursive framing of embodiment and sexual desirability among trans men and other transmasculine persons negotiating Internet-mediated homoerotic spaces. Micro-level analysis of discourse structure and macro-level analysis of socio-political context together show how tran…
Transgender language reform
Transgender people's recent increase in visibility in the contemporary United States has presented new linguistic challenges. This article investigates those challenges and presents strategies developed by trans speakers and promoted by trans activists concerned with language reform. The first of these is the selection of gendered lexical items, including both gender identity terms (woman, man, etc.) and more implicitly gendered words (e.g. beaut…
Trans self-identification and the language of neoliberal selfhood: Agency, power, and the limits of monologic discourse
Sociocultural linguists share with transgender communities a strong interest in the power of individuals to assert agency over linguistic patterns. For trans people, a key principle of activism isgender self-determination, which treats each individual as the ultimate authority on their own gender identity. This article explores some of the ways gender self-determination and self-identification surface in transgender people's linguistic practices.…
Beyond the cis gays’ cis gaze
Trans and other nonnormatively gendered subjectivities served a foundational role in queer linguistics, but it is only recently that a wave of trans researchers have begun to carve out distinctively trans approaches to the study of language. This commentary explores the question of why this shift has taken so long and how certain disciplinary norms have made linguistics a less-than-attractive home for trans scholars, namely an apoliticised ideolo…
Beyond binary gender: Creaky voice, gender, and the variationist enterprise
This paper promotes a sophisticated treatment of gender in variationism through a large-scale quantitative analysis of creak, a nonmodal voice quality stereotypically associated with women in US English. An analysis of our gender-diverse corpus, including cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, finds that gender does not predict variation; all gender groups produce high rates of creak. However, gender does interact with style: all spea…
Transgender voices: Insights on identity, embodiment, and the gender of the voice
The voice is a highly salient cue in the perception of gender and an important analytic factor in both phonetic and sociophonetic analysis. Although we have a wealth of knowledge about the social construction of gender through language, gender differences in the voice are frequently treated as natural, direct products of sex differentiation. This article focuses on three major areas of insight from studies of transgender people's voices that buil…
Variability in /s/ among transgender speakers: Evidence for a socially grounded account of gender and sibilants
Sibilant consonants are well-established as resources for the negotiation of gender and sexuality, but the origin of these links is less clearly agreed upon. Some researchers have pointed to sex differentiation in the vocal anatomy as a potential cause for gender differences in /s/, though a review of the literature indicates that learned articulatory patterns play a critical role. This article focuses on the spectral qualities of /s/ among 15 En…
That 3-word-ultimatum: The relationship escalator and normative romance in metalinguistic commentary about I love you
I love you is among the most meaningful utterances in English speakers' organization of intimacy, yet remains understudied by scholars of language. This article investigates metapragmatic discourse about the first exchange of I love you between romantic partners using data from the social media platform Reddit. The discourse reveals a normative model in which I love you functions not only as an expression of emotion but a speech act that is ideol…
Cultivating trans linguistics: Creativity and contestation
This special issue on trans linguistics forefronts both resistance and creativity in responding to transphobia and other interlocking power dynamics that trans people must navigate. These practices exist in the context of growing hostilities, violence and repression of gender non-normative practices on a global scale. The articles highlight the unique configurations of communication born out of trans experiences, illustrating how their study can …
Speaking out: The female voice in public contexts. Edited by Judith Baxter. Basingstoke, England and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
The other kind of coming out’
This article demonstrates the importance of considering transgender speakers apart from gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, even where there is significant overlap in the linguistic practices of these groups. Through an analysis of transgender coming out narratives, it is shown that previous accounts of this genre, which have focused on gays and lesbians, do not extend to the entire LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community. Coming out …
Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech: The perceived sexuality of transgender men
Sociophonetic inquiry into sexuality and the voice has often focused on the perception of men’s sexuality on the basis of disembodied voices. However, inconsistencies across these studies limit our ability to unite their findings into a cohesive model of gay-sounding speech. This paper focuses on variability among gay-sounding speakers by analyzing the voices of female-to-male transgender individuals, or trans men. Trans men who make use of testo…
Boycunts and Bonus Holes: Trans Men's Bodies, Neoliberalism, and the Sexual Productivity of Genitals
Recent theorizations of trans embodiment have brought attention to the ways neoliberalism limits the productivity of nonnormatively gendered bodies. This article deals with the discursive framing of embodiment and sexual desirability among trans men and other transmasculine persons negotiating Internet-mediated homoerotic spaces. Micro-level analysis of discourse structure and macro-level analysis of socio-political context together show how tran…
Transgender language reform
Transgender people's recent increase in visibility in the contemporary United States has presented new linguistic challenges. This article investigates those challenges and presents strategies developed by trans speakers and promoted by trans activists concerned with language reform. The first of these is the selection of gendered lexical items, including both gender identity terms (woman, man, etc.) and more implicitly gendered words (e.g. beaut…
Variability in /s/ among transgender speakers: Evidence for a socially grounded account of gender and sibilants
Sibilant consonants are well-established as resources for the negotiation of gender and sexuality, but the origin of these links is less clearly agreed upon. Some researchers have pointed to sex differentiation in the vocal anatomy as a potential cause for gender differences in /s/, though a review of the literature indicates that learned articulatory patterns play a critical role. This article focuses on the spectral qualities of /s/ among 15 En…
Gender as stylistic bricolage: Transmasculine voices and the relationship between fundamental frequency and /s
Despite the importance of gender differences in the voice, sociolinguists have not paid sufficient attention to the sociolinguistic processes through which phonetic resources are mobilized in the construction of a gendered voice. This article argues that gender differences in the voice-including those influenced by physiology-are best understood as elements of sociolinguistic style rather than static properties. With a focus on transgender speake…
Transgender voices: Insights on identity, embodiment, and the gender of the voice
The voice is a highly salient cue in the perception of gender and an important analytic factor in both phonetic and sociophonetic analysis. Although we have a wealth of knowledge about the social construction of gender through language, gender differences in the voice are frequently treated as natural, direct products of sex differentiation. This article focuses on three major areas of insight from studies of transgender people's voices that buil…
Trans self-identification and the language of neoliberal selfhood: Agency, power, and the limits of monologic discourse
Sociocultural linguists share with transgender communities a strong interest in the power of individuals to assert agency over linguistic patterns. For trans people, a key principle of activism isgender self-determination, which treats each individual as the ultimate authority on their own gender identity. This article explores some of the ways gender self-determination and self-identification surface in transgender people's linguistic practices.…
Sociophonetics
Sociophonetics is an analytic approach that overlaps with, but is also distinct from, related areas of study such as quantitative and variationist sociolinguistics. The distinctive characteristics of sociophonetics include the use of continuous (rather than categorical) variables, an interest in perception as well as production, and the implementation of a range of methods for data collection in both field settings and laboratories. Increasingly,…
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, is among the oldest and most fundamental tools of modern linguistic description and analysis. Established by the International Phonetic Association in the late nineteenth century, the IPA serves as a universal, standardized system for representing human speech, regardless of the language(s) of the speaker or the transcriber. The IPA has a number of useful qualities, the most important of which are (i) …
How we got here: Short-scale change in identity labels for trans, cis, and non-binary people in the 2000s
Though understudied in research on language variation and change, the lexicon is a crucial domain for sociopolitical transformations of language. This paper presents a corpus-based sociolinguistic analysis of changes in terms for transgender, cisgender, and non-binary individuals in four online communities on the social media blogging site, LiveJournal.com – one for trans women, one for trans men, one for non-binary people, and another for transg…
Beyond the cis gays’ cis gaze
Trans and other nonnormatively gendered subjectivities served a foundational role in queer linguistics, but it is only recently that a wave of trans researchers have begun to carve out distinctively trans approaches to the study of language. This commentary explores the question of why this shift has taken so long and how certain disciplinary norms have made linguistics a less-than-attractive home for trans scholars, namely an apoliticised ideolo…
Transformative spiritualities: For the pilgrimage of justice and peace
The Churches of the World Council of Churches have been on a "Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace"- together with people of goodwill—since they met for their assembly in Busan in 2013. Building peace with justice has been at the heart of the ecumenical movement since its beginnings. It reflects the call of the churches in a wounded world caused by systemic injustice - racism, sexism, xenophobia, economic exploitation, and violence among humans and ag…
Beyond binary gender: Creaky voice, gender, and the variationist enterprise
This paper promotes a sophisticated treatment of gender in variationism through a large-scale quantitative analysis of creak, a nonmodal voice quality stereotypically associated with women in US English. An analysis of our gender-diverse corpus, including cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, finds that gender does not predict variation; all gender groups produce high rates of creak. However, gender does interact with style: all spea…
Roundtable: Affordances, Diversity, and Inclusion on Dating Apps - A Dialogue between Sociologists and Media Studies Researchers about ‘Hinge
This roundtable paper is part of the project ‘Digitized Love and Intimacy on Hinge.’ It aims to investigate how digital dating apps reconfigure cultural attitudes to love and intimacy and, conversely, how said attitudes influence digital dating practices. The conversation is informed by (n)ethnographic usage of the app. As algorithms and affordances of dating applications can implicitly or explicitly privilege certain groups of users and exclude …
Current norms and best practices for collecting and representing sex/gender in linguistics: Towards ethical and inclusive methodologies
Amid changing ideas about sex and gender, there is a growing need to reexamine norms around their operationalization and theorization. This talk presents results from a survey exploring linguists’ practices for collecting information about research participants’ sex/gender. Based on 157 complete responses to date, we explore the popularity of different methods for gathering information about sex/gender and the methodological and theoretical impli…
Cultivating trans linguistics: Creativity and contestation
This special issue on trans linguistics forefronts both resistance and creativity in responding to transphobia and other interlocking power dynamics that trans people must navigate. These practices exist in the context of growing hostilities, violence and repression of gender non-normative practices on a global scale. The articles highlight the unique configurations of communication born out of trans experiences, illustrating how their study can …
Trans language activism and intersectional coalitions
Transphobic legislation and the linguist: The case of Florida’s Subsection 3
This paper joins critical sociolinguistic approaches to the law by examining legislation limiting trans-affirming language use, especially in schools, with a focus on Florida Statute §1000.071. Subsection (3) of this law prohibits most transgender teachers from sharing their pronouns with students. The analysis begins by extracting the linguistic claims made in legal defense of §1000.071: 1) that it is “false” to refer to a trans woman as she or …
That 3-word-ultimatum: The relationship escalator and normative romance in metalinguistic commentary about I love you
I love you is among the most meaningful utterances in English speakers' organization of intimacy, yet remains understudied by scholars of language. This article investigates metapragmatic discourse about the first exchange of I love you between romantic partners using data from the social media platform Reddit. The discourse reveals a normative model in which I love you functions not only as an expression of emotion but a speech act that is ideol…
Sociology (17 works) · Linguistics (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (10 works) · Gender Studies in Language (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Transgender (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political science (8 works)